Laverne & Curly

The slapstick anarchists of “Broad City.”

A stoner comedy about two woke girls, created by the best friends Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, “Broad City” launched, in 2009, as a set of shaggy, self-produced Web sketches. In 2014, it evolved into a confident sitcom début on Comedy Central, produced by Amy Poehler. From the start, the show attracted blazing devotees. Two years ago, when Jacobson and Glazer performed at the Bell House, in Brooklyn, the crowd around me was screaming as if we were at a Beatles concert, which maybe we were. In a post-“Louie” world, in which all the best sitcoms deal in melancholy and rage, “Broad City” offers something zany, warmhearted, and sweetly liberatory, like a piñata spilling out Red Hots, Plan B, and pot snickerdoodles.

In the grand TV-sitcom tradition, Jacobson and Glazer play less driven, less competent versions of their younger selves. Abbi is a klutzy romantic with a dead-end job, mopping up pubic hair at a health club called Soulstice and mooning after dudes in man buns. Ilana is a horndog narcissist who torments her co-workers at a Groupon-like Internet startup called Deals Deals Deals. One of the girls lives in Queens, the other in Brooklyn, but they’re glued together in ways that anyone who has been in one of those friendships might recognize: they text non-stop, Skype during sex (well, Ilana does), smoke up, cheerlead, and justify each other’s grossest mistakes. The first season was pretty much perfect, the second more hit-and-miss; but the first three episodes of the new season are solid. They also raise the stakes, slightly, when Abbi scores a longed-for promotion to trainer, while Ilana gets promoted—and then almost immediately canned, after she tweets out a viral bestiality video. (A well-intentioned one! She was trying to advertise a deal on colonics.)

The show nails the texture of modern New York, from the breastfeeding crone who rules the food co-op (a fantastic cameo by Melissa Leo) to the needlessly bitchy sorority girl in line at a Williamsburg bakery. But even when its characters fail epically, as they often do, the show feels optimistic, a daydream of two goofy slobs pinballing through life, every obstacle they meet just something new to ricochet off.

While “Broad City” is often praised for its warm portrait of friendship and sexual frankness, the spine of the show is genius slapstick. The first new episode tosses three axes in the air in the intro—a split-screen montage, showing a year of intimate bathroom gags—and then keeps juggling, offering up seven increasingly elaborate sequences of physical comedy. In the first act, Abbi is pulled, chest first, into a sewer grating; a pop-up sale turns into a riot; and Ilana gets her bicycle chain locked around her waist. The second act is an elegant two-step sequence, in which Abbi, desperate to pee, sneaks into a construction site’s porta-potty, which is then pulled up into the air by a crane—and when she escapes, gasping in relief, Ilana, who is wearing that bicycle chain, gets hooked onto the back of a bread truck, which drives off. The whole bit is perfectly timed and edited, down to the punch line: when Abbi runs over to bawl out the truck driver, she finds him watching porn as he drives. “Nice ass!” he screams as she walks away. “I know!” she yells back, in exasperation.

Later, Ilana gets magnetized to a giant set of dangling metal testicles at an art exhibit. It’s the kind of lunatic image the show specializes in, an echo of classic comedy, like the disembodied nose in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper.” And while it works as a literal payoff to Ilana’s rants about being trapped by patriarchy, it’s also satisfying as raw comedy physics; even after Abbi rescues Ilana, she keeps trying to balance the balls, adjusting a spiky pubic hair—a good citizen to the end.

On a recent podcast with the critic Andy Greenwald, Glazer described the show’s premise as “vulnerability is strength.” Out of context, that might sound gooey, but it reveals something about “Broad City” ’s compassionate take on shit and sex, its insistence that bodies out of control are hilarious and lovely, not dirty and grotesque. Jacobson and Glazer’s take on identity politics—and their characters’ well-intentioned but barely informed fourth-wave, queerish, anti-rape/pro-porn intersectional feminism—is a more intricate matter, both a part of the show’s philosophy and a subject of its satire. When it comes to race, the series has had a particularly complicated arc, stretching back to the Web sketches, which included a loving homage to “Do the Right Thing,” with Abbi and Ilana punching the air like Rosie Perez.

Visually, and in terms of their friendships, the world of “Broad City” is racially inclusive. For a while, this diversity was regularly used as a snotty wedge against HBO’s “Girls,” as if Abbi and Ilana were the pure Elizabeth Warren to Lena Dunham’s tainted Hillary Clinton. But, in fact, Abbi and Ilana, just like Hannah Horvath, aren’t generic young women: they’re college-educated white kids from the Northeast, artsy urbanites who aren’t rich but also aren’t poor, even if they can’t afford much. They’re also secular Jews in a way that network sitcoms never allowed characters to be, in the nineties, when “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” and “Mad About You” smooshed New Yorkers into an ethnically vanilla, network-friendly neutrality.

Like many people in this demographic, the characters on “Broad City” are deeply into hip-hop. This is particularly true of the fictional Ilana, who dates a black guy, Lincoln (Hannibal Buress), a supremely chill dentist. (“Hey, bwah,” she says when she calls him. “Hey, grah,” he replies.) But Ilana’s not just a girl with a diverse social circle, a taste for Lil Wayne, and graphic fantasies about Rihanna backstage at the Barclays Center. She’s legitimately obsessed with the notion of herself as a bi-poly-cross-ethnic sexual adventurer; at times, she seems to believe that she’s not white, accusing her boss, say, of white privilege. When she hooks up with a doppelgänger (played by the Glazer doppelgänger Alia Shawkat), Ilana explains that, in bed, she craves difference: “Different colors, different shapes, different sizes. People who are hotter, uglier. More smart; not more smart. Innies, outies! I don’t know, a Catholic person.” It’s a mixture of idealism and solipsism that reminded me of a German ex of mine, who insisted on calling himself “a citizen of the verld.”

In real life, a white woman like this might be a nightmare of cultural appropriation, screaming “Bow down, bitches!” and tweeting hot takes on Black Lives Matter which she’s barely skimmed. Ilana’s fascination with blackness has a warmer feeling, in part because she is such an awed true believer when it comes to her heroines: as Oprah is to Liz Lemon, Nicki Minaj is to Ilana. Still, the show has always had a tricky undercurrent—the risk of finding something intrinsically funny about white people talking like black people—and it’s an issue that has intensified as the national conversation has shifted around it. (The fictional Abbi expresses this worry, in a perfect modern koan. “You’re so anti-racist, sometimes, that you’re actually really racist,” she tells Ilana.) Last season, some viewers were put off when Ilana’s ridiculously elaborate masturbation ritual included pulling on big gold-hoop earrings that read, in lacy script, “Latina.” Who was that joke on? And who got to make it?

This season, rather than skirt the subject, the show steers straight into it, starting with a sly gag that involves Ilana imitating foreigners, from Italians to Germans. “Do Chinese!” Abbi says. Ilana stares back, knowingly: “It’s 2016, dude.” This becomes the rich theme of the second episode, when Ilana asks Abbi to impersonate her for her co-op shift. Abbi’s version of Ilana, it turns out, is hysterically crude and offensive, like Ilana seen through the eyes of her meanest Internet enemy: in a mesh crop top and those “Latina” earrings, Abbi-as-Ilana squeezes her breasts, howls “Rape culture sucks!,” and moans “Yaaas!” When a white woman assigns her to clean the bathroom, Abbi-as-Ilana explains earnestly that she and the woman are “queens” and should not be “in the back of the bus, cleaning up white dudes’ dreadlocks, ja feel?”

It’s a provocative, unsettling routine that hits from multiple angles. There’s Abbi’s surprisingly harsh view of her friend. (Ilana isn’t any better at doing Abbi: she mewls, “Hi. I’m Abbi. I love pugs. My fahmily comes from a long line of Colonial Jews.”) The bit mocks white women, like Ilana, who glom on to black politics. And it suggests a cathartic, ongoing wrestling match with the show’s own tricksy position, drawing a line between this coarse and manipulative Ilana and the endearing hustler whom fans love. It’s the type of meta-comedy that TV sitcoms often experiment with once they are no longer novelties, when the creators have begun to engage, consciously or unconsciously, in a conversation with viewers’ responses.

All of which would be self-indulgent if it weren’t for the fact that the episode is non-stop funny. The clever dialogue revs it up, but the jokes click in because of the sheer anarchic strangeness of Jacobson’s performance, as she masturbates an eggplant and falls backward into a display of bulk beans, mid-twerk. The show’s secret engine, however, may be its willingness to tiptoe close to failure. There’s an argument that any critique of comedy is a joke-killer. But great comedians don’t fold and sulk when people raise questions—they just make better bits and bolder, more ambitious jokes. Vulnerability is strength! And a nervous laugh is also a laugh, after all. ♦